Shaped.ai, an AI recommendation and search platform for marketplaces, e-commerce, and content companies, announced funding of $8 million and the launch of their new self-serve cloud product.
Launched by AI veterans from Meta and Uber, Shaped helps enterprises leverage their data, tap into large language models, and quickly and securely build relevant and personalized user experiences that consistently increase engagement and revenue. The Series A funding round was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from Y-Combinator and executives and founders from Clickhouse, DocuSign, Okta, Rippling, and StitchFix. In connection with the funding, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru joins the board of directors.
Shaped differentiates itself by making AI-powered personalization much easier. And the platform’s new self-serve offering empowers teams to connect their data and seamlessly build real-time, semantic discovery models for recommendations and search — all without the costs of building it from the ground-up. And Shaped achieves this by seamlessly integrating with existing data sources, understanding content without manual tagging (due to its generative AI capabilities), and adapting to user behavior in real-time.
Shaped’s self-serve platform goes beyond just personalization. And by combining AI with a focus on actionable insights, Shaped gives businesses the tools to deliver impactful user journeys that boost conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
KEY QUOTES:
“Consumers expect personalized digital experiences with every brand, but under the hood, this can be difficult to build and orchestrate. AI is elevating both the expectation and costs to build these experiences. Shaped empowers companies to leverage their data into powerful user experiences that drive business outcomes. We’re not just building another personalization engine; we’re building the foundation for a future where every user interaction is informed, intelligent, and impactful.”
– Tullie Murrell, co-founder and CEO of Shaped
“The democratization of content creation with AI has led to a fundamental change in how users engage with online content, and in turn created the need for every business to put personalization and user experience at the core of their business to engage, acquire, and retain their users. We are excited to partner with Tullie, Dan, and the Shaped team as they leverage their deep and nuanced understanding of this transition in the market to create the most compelling and delightful personalization, experience, and search platform that is easy to implement and use by enterprises in every vertical to create a magical user experience for their end users.”
– Karan Mehandru of Madrona
“When trading off whether to build or buy a recommendation system our guiding principle was simple — invest in the solution that will deliver the best possible user experience. After assessing the RecSys (Recommender Systems) landscape, Shaped became the obvious choice. It offered both ends of the spectrum — ease of integration with our existing data infrastructure, as well as high configurability under the hood. This allowed us to achieve rapid time-to-value while getting our hands dirty with bespoke state-of-the-art models tailored to our data.”
– Han Yuan, CTO of Outdoorsy
“Shaped enables us to drive repeat purchases and boost average order values by making our platform more relevant to each individual shopper.”
– Gui Nazareth, CEO of Trela
